Cookbook Thriving: Alex Stupak and Jordana Rothman, Tacos: Recipes and Provocations
Saturday's Child Works Hard for a Living
Skipping the Read column this week—last week was packed full of demanding events and meetings.
Anyway, partly to relax, I thought I’d pick out a cookbook that I have a very happy relationship with. Tacos is one of my most heavily-used books and yet in a way I don’t use it nearly enough. Let me show you what I mean:
The way I show love for a recipe is splattering things on it, apparently.
I use the flour tortilla recipe here a lot. It’s simple—the basic trick of it is some lard in the dough. But the dough and the cookery described are no-fail for me at this point, and the result is always a thousand times better than store-bought flour tortillas, which are almost always gummy. About the only downside is that they don’t store for long—by the third day in the fridge they’re stiff and they don’t reheat very well.
I’m less successful with the even simpler corn tortilla recipe in the book, because it’s entirely about the cookery. I have a tortilla press but somehow getting just the right amount of dough in the press, using just the right plastic wrap on both sides to keep it from sticking, and cooking the tortilla leads to uneven results unless I focus really intensely on doing it right. That, I’ve found, is not the book’s fault, it’s my fault, because I have the same issue with every corn tortilla recipe I’ve ever tried. It’s possible that the issue is with using masa harina with water rather than fresh masa, but to get fresh masa around here, I’d have to go out to Kennett Square or down to Philadelphia, I think. I’ve never had the patience to try and make it myself—it’s a chore.
But I haven’t really given the rest of this book its full due. I’ve made some of the salsas in it and they’re all fantastic. But I haven’t made any of the really clever or basic recipes for taco fillings. Part of that is that some of them are the kind of thing I know how to do without any guidance at all, like carnitas. Others are the kind of thing I’d be eating all by myself in our typical household meals, like pork tongue or blood sausage and fava beans. (Plus pork tongue would really require a trip to the Italian Market, and if I’m at the Italian Market, I’m not going to get stuff to make tacos, I’m going to eat tacos at South Philly Barbacoa.)
So today I’m going to use more of the book. I really like the mood of it throughout. It’s a good example of the kind of approach I love, compared to Brock’s South. There’s some standards set up in very basic ways, there’s some exotic variants, there’s some very accessible discussion about techniques, there’s substitutions suggested for difficult-to-get items. When the book goes all out on a challenging technique—cochinita pibil tacos—there’s the simple version of the recipe first and then there’s the recipe that requires digging a hole in the ground, building a red brick oven in it, and roasting a pork shoulder in that.
Not making that one today. Someday, maybe. In fact, looking through the book, I’m kind of tempted to plan a late spring party here for some folks and plan on making 5-6 of these recipes. I’m embarrassed not to have tried some of them yet. They’re almost all simple, as tacos should be, but they’re all very appealing and cover a really wide range of tastes and dietary restrictions. (Corn tortillas are vegan and gluten-free, for example.)
Today I’m going to take a stab at making a small number of flour tortillas with the usual recipe (there’s only two of us), the salsa de arbol (though I’ll be using dried Calabrian chiles because that’s what I could find in the store), and some skirt steak with garlic and some fried catfish for fish tacos. I might make a salsa verde but that could be overkill, plus I have a great commercial salsa verde here already. I have tomatillos but I might save those to make a chile verde with pork during the coming week.
I’m tempted by the chicken tortillas, which are masa harina combined with finely ground chicken breast. I don’t know that this will solve my cookery issues with corn tortillas, but I imagine those would make really great quesadillas for the next few days.